Here’s a “Binary Choice” for the NeverTrump Haters

Donald Trump supported Paul Ryan and “his” healthcare reform bill throughout the process, right up to the moment the vote was cancelled for the (apparently) last time due to a lack of support from the Freedom Caucus, the only members of Congress with any principles, courage, or shame. Donald Trump wanted this reform bill. It was not a free market solution because Trump didn’t want a free market solution, as he made very clear to anyone without orange fairy dust in his ears throughout the GOP Primaries.

Now, as I have repeatedly predicted (see hereand here, for example), his cult — and remarkably, the cult continues to grow rather than shrink in the face of ever-more-obvious realities — is busy laying the failure at Ryan’s feet. Meanwhile, the cult members, from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and a thousand online trolls, to newly minted members such as Mark Levin, are carefully avoiding a harsh word for the man who is actually responsible for this national disgrace, as he is ultimately responsible, at least as a figurehairdo, for the entire stinking swamp that is the Trump GOP, aka the same old establishment, more deeply entrenched than ever thanks to the divide and conquer strategy the old boys’ club pursued last year, using Trump as their shiny object to lure normal, formerly sensible people away from their souls. (I’ve written about that in detail, too.)

So feverish is the irrational cultist in slavering over the Trump presidency’s ashes in search of salvation, that even while blaming the GOP leadership (miraculously not including the sitting POTUS) for the healthcare reform failure, Mark Levin has interrupted his Trump-shielding diatribe long enough to revert to the old standby of all Trump cultists, namely spewing hatred at the so-called NeverTrumpers, meaning Republican voters who refused to support a man they correctly identified as the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the cause of conservatism in America.

I am not an American voter, and although I feel an unambivalent disdain for Trump and his core supporters (and pity for those, including some I know and like, who got swept up in the fever and lost their marbles, at least temporarily), I cannot know with absolute certainty what I would have done in the voting booth on Election Day, with Hillary Clinton’s name staring me in the face as the “alternative.” Still, I have always written sympathetically of the NeverTrumpers, partly out of an instinctive preference for the courageous underdog, and partly because, as a matter of principle, their position was and is clearly the rational one. The complex amalgamation of groupthink emotionalism, generations of mass government education, a collapsed culture, and kneejerk populism that allowed otherwise normal human beings to imagine for one second that a man such as Donald Trump could or should be the president of a nation, let alone of the leading nation of this era, is truly a political cataclysm of world-historical significance.

In the face of this wave of irrationalism that gave modernity Hillary vs. Trump as its final option for survival — in other words, that sealed modernity’s demise — a small group of decent Americans kept their heads when all about them were losing theirs. For their troubles, and their intransigence in the midst of the certain defeat of everything they believed in, these happy few have been abandoned even by the few prominent public voices who might once have been their defenders. How many of these NeverTrumpers cut their conservative teeth on Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny? — only to have the man himself condemn them as enemies of conservatism and America, as he apparently did again today on his radio program.

So let me frame the issue as starkly and bluntly as possible, by means of a simple question to all Americans reading these words.

William F. Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University. In that light, I propose the following “binary choice,” to borrow a favorite term of Trump’s alt-establishment apologists:

Take a moment to think it over, and then tell me honestly, from your heart of hearts, whether America at this moment would be better off led by the marriage of TV vulgarianism and McConnellesque duplicity that is the Trump-Ryan-McConnell GOP, or by a representative cross-section of the NeverTrump movement?

Which group would be more likely to cleave to Constitutional principles?

Which group would be more likely to begin a legislative negotiation by defining its principled position fully and openly, rather than beginning from ten steps over the line into the opposition’s turf?

Which group would actually be able to articulate its principles — liberty, limited government, individual self-determination — without kowtowing to progressive priorities and rhetorical squishiness?

Which group would be more likely to make a good faith effort to follow through on its conservative-sounding campaign promises with integrity and vigor, rather than immediately reverting to uniparty business as usual the day after the election?

Which group, in short, would you trust with your own and your country’s future?

People can argue about specific voting decisions all day long. But to smear fellow citizens as unAmerican for not supporting Trump, as though Trump himself were America — a typical cultist’s attitude toward the cult leader — is the kind of unhinged, childish, and low-minded smear one would expect from a vulgar, hypersensitive crybaby like…well, like Donald Trump.